Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email

Search This Blog

Highly Effective Software Teams

A few weeks ago our Board of Directors asked me to present my assessment of the state of software.
I was hired to organize and grow the software team and the directors wanted to know what kind of a team we needed to build. I was hoping that I can just reference an article somewhere that would give me the answer, unfortunately I didn’t find anything suitable. During my research I did find some great material that will be helpful if your job is to put together a highly effective software team.

A highly effective software team has the following key characteristics: dependable, committed to shared goals, passionate about technology, respectful and compassionate. These are not limited to technology industry, it can easily apply to finance, medicine, or sports as well. Below is the summary and references that I found.

Dependable

If you are creating a software product, you need to deliver your software to your users. Your users need to know that you are able to solve their problems on time and with quality to depend on your product. If the team can’t meet deadlines your customers don't know how to make their plans and will probably make plans that exclude you. Highly effective software teams have the technical knowledge, dependency management and self awareness to come up with a good project plan. Bright Hub Project Management has a great article on Top 10 Characteristics of an Effective Project Team:

Highly effective software teams communicate and solve issues proactively. When you working with them you are rarely blindsided. A great piece on proactive communication is written by Alina Vrabie on LifeHacker:

Communication is obviously important, but what really matters is proactive communication. Proactive communication can be materialized in four ways:

Team members provide information before being asked.

They provide support and assistance before being asked.

They take team initiative by providing guidance and making suggestions to other team members.

They provide updates, creating situational awareness for other team members.

Committed to Shared Goals

I am yet to see a successful technology company that is comprised of part time people. While you can create an early prototype and test the market slicing your attention between various projects, you will never have a highly effective team whose passion and attention is split between various companies and projects. There are some rare exceptions such as Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, but I doubt you can find enough of those types of people to create a full team. In my 20 years of experience in software: a person who works for you 50% of the time gives you 40% of the output, a person who is working for you 100% of the time gives you 120% of the output. Here Bright Hub Project Management again hit the nail on the head:

Passionate about Technology

The best software teams are comprised of technology enthusiasts that love learning new things and improving themselves. There is no way to fake it: people who are in tech just for the paycheck rarely drive you to adopt new frameworks, tools and techniques. The world of technology evolves too fast and changes too much for someone who wants a regular office job. Highly effective software teams continuously look to grow. Amit Kaura has a great article on Agile Delivery Teams:

Highly effective software teams create a safe space where their team mates, colleagues and customers can be themselves. Safe space also means that team members can voice their criticism and dissatisfaction. Fostering a diverse and respectful environment is a responsibility of the leadership and every team member and highly effective teams nail it.

Conclusion

There are many characteristics of highly effective software teams and it might not be possible to attribute it to just a few factors, but in my research these four things came up over and over. I haven’t found a successful company whose software teams were not: dependable, committed, passionate and compassionate.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

After interviewing and hiring hundreds of engineers over the past 12+ years I have come up with a few checklists. I wanted to share one of those with you so you could conduct comprehensive interviews of QA Engineers for your team.

I use this checklist when I review incoming resumes and during the interview. It keeps me from missing areas that ensure a good team and technology fit. I hope you make good use of them. If you think there are good questions or topics that I have missed - get in touch with me!

At Ethos we are building a distributed mortgage origination system and in mortgage there is a lot of
different user types with processes that vary depending on geography. One of our ongoing discussions is about how much of the logic resides in code vs. being in a workflow system or configuration. After researching this topic for a bit, I have arrived at a conclusion that the logic should live outside of code very infrequently, which might come as a surprise to a lot of enterprise software engineers.

Costs of configuration files and workflow engines
First thing that I assume is true is that having any logic outside of the code has costs associated with it. Debugging highly configurable system involves not only getting the appropriate branch from source control, you also need to make sure that the right configuration values or the database. In most cases this is harder for programmers to deal with. In many FinTech companies where the production data is not made readily accessible…

About 20 years ago when I started working in technology companies I remember “the best” engineers had similar patterns:
-They worked crazy hours
-They knew the systems no one else knew
-They could react and deliver something faster than anyone else
You could always hear other employees say: “Bob is really smart, no one knows how to get anything done in system X besides him!”

This reinforced optimization around being the only person who knew how to do something in some part of the code. That in turn reinforced job security and bargaining for those engineers, but also chained them to a particular system. We had big code bases of C++ or Java code where some “Bob” hacked up features as soon as he possibly could. “Bob” would have occasional nuclear disasters where he’d sleep in the office or through the weekend and then everyone would thank him for how he “saved the day.” “Bob” sacrificed his quality of life to get praise when he hacked stuff up quickly and then the second time when n…